The choice of which engine to use involves a number of tradeoffs: the linear congruential engine is moderately fast and has a very small storage requirement for state. The lagged Fibonacci generators are very fast even on processors without advanced arithmetic instruction sets, at the expense of greater state storage and sometimes less desirable spectral characteristics. The Mersenne twister is slower and has greater state storage requirements but with the right parameters has the longest non-repeating sequence with the most desirable spectral characteristics (for a given definition of desirable).

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Random number engine adaptors generate pseudo-random numbers using another random number engine as entropy source. They are generally used to alter the spectral characteristics of the underlying engine.

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